Danger lurks on Expressway

It’s not just outside bars or during a leisurely walk to home that robbers and rapists in Gurgaon are targeting women. The high-speed Delhi-Gurgaon expressway is another place where they lurk in corners to prey on women. Deevakar Anand reports.

It’s not just outside bars or during a leisurely walk to home that robbers and rapists in Gurgaon are targeting women. The high-speed Delhi-Gurgaon expressway is another place where they lurk in corners to prey on women.

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HT did a reality check along the 18-km stretch of the E-way — from the Delhi- Gurgaon border toll plaza to the Kherki Dhaula toll plaza — and found it is left unattended, posing a risk to thousands of women who pass through it in cars or autos.

Of the 43 PCR vans with the Gurgaon police, only about half-a-dozen care to venture out in the darkness.

“I was driving back home on the E-way around 10:30pm on February 23 when drunken men in a car chased me and threw a beer bottle at my window,” narrated 37-year-old Rajdeep Kaur, a corporate trainer.

Though Kaur’s is not a one-off incident, DCP (Crime) Maheswar Dayal brushes aside the allegation of ‘poor policing’. “We constantly patrol the E-way and have put boards displaying our control room numbers. We have deployed bike-borne constables as well,” he claimed.

“I have been travelling in such cabs for four years as few government-run buses ply on this route and those which do, do not stop as there is no bus shelter,” complained 25-year-old Priya, who waits for cabs at Shankar Chowk to go back home to Delhi every day.

Haryana state transport secretary Rajan Bhagat passed the buck: “It’s a law and order problem.”

There are at least five points on the E-way where private buses and cabs stop for passengers, though it is illegal to stop unless one has valid reasons like a flat tyre or petrol shortage. This is where cabbie gangs have been found to be active.

DCP, Traffic, Bharti Arora could not be reached for any comment.